Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

Escaping the Chaos: Why Lobby Racing Just Isn’t Enough

I started doing simracing a couple of years ago, and after some rocky days of learning where I was basically just trying to keep the car on the black stuff and not end up in the grass every second corner, I found myself playing Assetto Corsa Competizione the most. Eventually, you get tired of the AI. They are predictable and they don’t make the kind of human mistakes that make racing exciting, so you start to play online. And yeah, that’s a big difference, especially in ACC, playing the AI and playing the people. It’s much more unpredictable, much more fun, and much more crashes, which is the darker part of it.

But yeah, this is very good overall. Assetto Corsa Competizione provides competition races within the game itself, but this service doesn’t have much deeper something in it. It’s quite boring after a while because there is only one option in one time, and sometimes when you don’t have all the stars for the given track, you cannot even join at all. But there is another option, the lobby service, which is where most people start their e-racing career – Low Fuel Motosport independent racing portal.

There is always around 900 active servers where you can race at any given moment. A lot of them have a pretty full list of people racing, so it’s a big fun when you get a good grid, but it’s dangerous, especially when you are not experienced enough. You will lose your safety rating very quickly because people are crashing like crazy over there. You have to build up the good SA and go to the lobby server where you have to have some amount of SA to join it. Those servers are much, much better than without any restriction, which is basically like Destruction Derby and killing your rating in ACC.

The Independent Powerhouse: Choosing LFM on PC

So after a lot of crashes, a lot of yeeting discussions in the chat where people are just screaming, and quite a lot of races actually on the lobby, I started to look around for even better option to race. And I came across Low Fuel Motorsport as the leading independent platform for racing. Low Fuel Motorsport is mostly focused on ACC, which is excellent for me, and it’s a big service. There are huge amount of organized races, they have a system when and how to join, and so forth. I chose another option on the market. This is for PC players only. If you have a PlayStation or Xbox, you would probably choose SimGrid, which goes for the consoles as well. Another option, similar, is Pitskill.io, but Low Fuel Motorsport is the largest sim racing platform at this very moment in 2025, by far. So this should be your first option, probably, if you are on PC and you want to race a lot with kind of the same quality persons like you on daily races. So I opted out for Low Fuel Motorsport like two years ago, and here is my experience with it.

The License Hurdle: Proving You Belong on the Grid

To join Low Fuel Motorsport and be able to race, you have to prove yourself as a kind of experienced driver, although you don’t need to be that super fast as the top of the race, but you have to be reasonably good. I like the system to join because it makes the good selection and those destruction derby players are filtered out with this system and this is a very good system. So if you want to join races, they have a practice server which is reachable via internet. You can find it within the free lobby servers. Just type in Low Fuel Motorsport LFM into the server selection and you got it. You have to find which is it on the server. To register you can use Steam or Discord. Then you have to go to the race and try to make 7 clean rounds and be within the range of the best times, maximum 5% on the top of the best times. This is the 107% rule they use to keep the pace consistent. After 2 or 3 attempts I was able to reach and I obtained the license to race. So my journey begins here. If you want to race Nordschleife, you have to make a similar license, but I didn’t go for Nordschleife yet. I just like shorter tracks and Nordschleife still has to wait for me. I’m not that interested to get into that.

Tools of the Trade: Technical Requirements for Serious Racing

To join the races you have to obviously sign up for the specific race in time and the other thing you must have is to download the utility which is called ACC connector which somehow translate the IP address of the server to your local IP address and then you have to go to local servers like on the LAN and the server when it goes online it will appear there. This is one extra tool you have to have when you want to race on the Low Fuel Motorsport and well this is a decision they made because you know the ACC had some outages and actually they still have the outages of the network. Low Fuel Motorsport didn’t want to rely on the public multiplayer service of the game and they are building like local servers independent of the race so when the ACC multiplayer is down you can still play Low Fuel Motorsport. This is sometimes problem because when the network is down you cannot even load your LAN server somehow so sometimes it’s struggle but it’s better. It’s more stable the servers especially those which are located in European area has a great ping and technically the servers are very good. Another thing you may want is the LFM Livery Tool.

If you don’t have this, everyone is just driving around in a plain white or carbon car and you can’t see the cool designs that teams put together. It makes the grid look much more professional when you can actually see the sponsors and the colors of the other cars. You also have to get used to their custom Balance of Performance, or BoP. LFM adds weight or restrictors to certain cars to make sure the field is even. So even if the game developers made one car too fast, LFM balances it out so you can still drive an older car and not be totally out of the race. This keeps the variety high which is good.

The Daily Grind: Sprints and the Rating Struggle

So I did this basic license and I started to race. The options were to race, it’s quite big, but at the end you don’t have that much when you start. You can only race the 15 minute sprint races at the moment and that’s it because you are not building up your safety rating and your ELO enough yet. So you are doing these 15 minute races. Last year it was 20 minutes, now they push it to the 15 minutes. Well, that’s how they decided. So when you start to race you have to join the race. Every 45 minutes there is another 15 minute race. So you have plentiful options to race during the day, as much as you want, you don’t have any restrictions. You just click and wait a bit and you can join the races. So once you do that you go to practice. There is not allowed to race in the practice, it’s just to prepare your setups and so on. Then you go to qualification which is usually 7 minutes and then 15 minutes race. Races are much better than lobbies. This is the best advantage of Low Fuel Motorsport.

Here the races have its quality, even though when you are on the low tier the people are not trying to hit you as crazy and there are not that many accidents as there are on the ACC lobbies, especially those without SA filter. Here your journey starts, you are building up your ELO and you are building up your SA. When you reach the threshold you can join another races which are only filtered for the people with the higher ELO and higher safety rating. So ELO and safety rating decide everything. I’m not the greatest racer, so I was kind of struggling and stagnating because the ELO and SA rise slower than it falls. So you can build up for several clean races and then you have one wrong race where you get caught in someone else’s mess and it falls down instantly. But this is a fair play system which makes you focus on the safety first and then on the speed. This is the way how you should really learn driving in general. So you know your car, you know the spatial awareness and everything is much more important when racing here than when doing lobbies. So this really makes a big distinction and for those people who want real racing, they will like it a lot.

The Problem with Variety: GT4s and DLC Barriers

You are building up, and once you reach some threshold you can do the endurance racing 45 minutes or a higher league of 20-25 minutes races. They provide even the races for the GT4 cars or like specific BMW M2 races. But I don’t do that because especially those are the GT4 cars. You have to have the DLC and let’s be honest, how many people really do have this DLC? It’s a fraction of those having the base game. So if you really want to play all the races during the whole season, you have to have the DLCs actually because some tracks, some cars are not allowed in the base game so you have to pay for those DLCs of the base game. So here GT4 races are pretty empty. So if nobody is racing, it’s boring.

I tried a couple of times but only a few players joined so I think this is almost useless category on the Low Fuel Motorsport. Endurance is good because and I really love to do the low tier endurance races last year. Because you have to make some tactics, there is always a pit stop so you don’t need to be the fastest but you have to think more strategically because of the pit stop and amount of fuel and it makes it really good. There is not that much players playing 45 minutes but quite enough to enjoy the race. Actually here I’m pretty angry on the Low Fuel Motorsport. They wanted to tweak it up for the ongoing season which is ending by the new year and they made a feedback and forum what to improve. I told them my way, what I want and actually everything happened was the opposite. So instead of 25 minutes like spring race, now we have only 15 minutes spring race and the 45 minutes endurance race is not yet reachable for me because I don’t have enough SA and ELO. So actually I can only do 15 minutes races right now which is ok but I was trying 45 minutes sprints and endurance like almost the same amount of races I did. So now it’s not possible for me. Yes, if I reach the level of SA, of the safety, I can join it but I’m not yet there. As I told you it’s quite tricky to improve but I’m not the best racer. What happened is that the options for me to race narrowed down pretty steeply and especially considering they were asking what to improve and they did the opposite, I’m not that happy with it.

Climbing the Ranks: Licenses and Tier Divisions

Even though the sprint races are short, the system behind them is very deep. When you join for example the 15 minutes sprint, there are a lot of people really in the tables, so it’s divided to even six divisions. So you’re usually playing the lowest tier division and as your indexes go up you are joining the higher divisions in the tier, like tier one, tier two. So there are six divisions for example. So you are not just attending more professional races, but even within those races you are divided to the division, so it’s pretty complex and you are racing against people on the similar skill set that you have and comparing to them. This leads to the actual License Tiers which are the backbone of the whole thing. You start as a Rookie and you have to grind your way through Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and eventually the Alien tier if you are fast enough. Each of these tiers has specific Safety Rating (SR) and ELO requirements. It’s a proper hierarchy that keeps the racing clean because nobody wants to lose their hard-earned indexes. But like I said, when they change the rules and lock you out of the endurance races you used to love because your ELO isn’t high enough yet, it feels like the goalposts are moving.

The Frustrating Reality of the Appeal System

Now, how to handle all these situations like accidents, appeals, and penalties. This is something which works technically, but I have to say I don’t like it very much. If you think somebody crashed you, you can appeal, but you have to make a video on YouTube, you have to put some specific information into that video, and then you can place an appeal. You spend a lot of time doing videos and stuff, and then the appeal might go wrong anyway. I didn’t do this yet because it’s a pretty time-consuming process to appeal, so I don’t appeal when I’m being crashed by people, but other people do appeal against you. I had some penalties where you have to agree with the decision of the arbiter who said that you did a mistake. Usually, you get some deduction of your Elo and you lose some seconds in the race results. But when they decide that you hit someone by purpose, like a retaliatory accident, you can get even 28 days of ban, and I actually got one. The situation looked like I really did it on purpose, but I know myself and I know what really happened. The guy who went against me in this appeal made the video in a way that looks like I was the one at fault, but actually, it was his fault. Because I didn’t make my own video, I couldn’t prove anything. What really hurts me is that there is no easy possibility to appeal against these big ban penalties. For small penalties, you can appeal right away from the form, but for a 28-day ban, you have to go to some hidden menu, create a ticket, and it really sucks. They don’t give you any guidance or a simple button to click, so they really don’t care much about this process or hearing your side.

Utility Over Community: The Patreon Model

The communication with the creators and the arbiters is very weak in my opinion. Even though they have a sophisticated website and a Discord server, the feedback feels read-only. You make a question, they reply, and that’s it. If the reply isn’t good enough, you have to create a whole new thread. It makes Low Fuel Motorsport feel more like a utility or a tool rather than a community-building service. They will likely have a problem with this at some point because there is no emotional attachment. They are even very strict about the in-game chat; if you say “sorry” to someone you crashed by mistake, they might penalize you for chatting, which is crazy to me. This cold environment is visible in how they handle the business side too. There are premium options where you can become a Patreon donator. This gives you things like deeper statistics and the ability to sign up for races sooner. I think the early sign-up is pretty useless because the servers usually only get full right before the race starts anyway. They probably make a couple of ten thousand euros per month from these donations and affiliations with brands like Fanatec or Syncmesh, but it’s a donation model. I don’t donate yet, especially after being angry about how they handled my ban. Most people don’t donate, and since the communication is so weak, you don’t feel like you are part of something you want to support with money.

The Road Ahead: ACC Stagnation and Future Sim Titles

The system is super reliant on ACC, and as we know, ACC is getting less focus from the developers because of the new games they are building. This might be the end of the road at some point. LFM is trying to move into games like Le Mans Ultimate or the original Assetto Corsa, but those races are often empty or feel like a beta. 90% of the players are on ACC. They are scared that the game is at the end of its life cycle and they are making petitions like the #SaveACC one to the developers, but it feels like they are just trying to save their own business model rather than the community. Everyone is waiting to see if they will move to Assetto Corsa EVO in 2026. If you are looking at this from a global perspective, it is mostly a European service. During the day, the European servers are packed, but the US servers during the night are pretty empty. I estimate only 10-15% of the players are from outside of Europe. You can still join with a higher ping and it’s playable, but it’s not the same experience. To conclude, the racing on Low Fuel Motorsport is unmatched in the current environment—only iRacing is on this level. It’s a great service for the racing itself, but do not expect to join a community. It is a utility to get clean races, and the moment a better option comes along, people will probably just jump off to that. If you want real racing, go for it, but keep your expectations low for the social side.

The post Low Fuel Motorsport Review: The Reality of Competitive Assetto Corsa Competizione Racing appeared first on Game Reviews, News, Videos & More for Every Gamer – PC, PlayStation, Xbox in 2026.

Tower Of Power

HIGH Addicting play loop. Excellent period music.

LOW Readability issues. Some elements seem too random.

WTF Why is the Mafia so mean to me? : (

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Having devoured Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket last month (it’s excellent, of course, you should read it, of course) I’ve been thinking that early 20^th century America gets short shrift in terms of artistic representation. I’m talking about, say, 1900 – 1938.

World War I ushered in an armada of modern horrors and casts a long historical shadow, but it’s a murky, chimerical conflict — it doesn’t have the obvious Good vs. Evil resonances of World War II. The Depression is, well, depressing, and being an economic and societal failure, it’s inherently less sexy and marketable to the masses. Not to mention, also, the awkward fact that we’ve learned little, if anything, from it. Worst of all, the vibrant music of the era has been co-opted into that most aberrant of modern pseudo-genre slop, electroswing.

Things really aren’t any better in the gaming scene. There aren’t any heavy hitters – across any genre – that truly embrace the era. None that I know of, at least. However, this could change with the 1.0 release of News Tower, a sweet and compelling strategy hybrid of colony manager and tycoon game whose mechanics put players into a vanished (but still relevant) place and time.

News Tower presents players with a side-on, ant colony-style view of a tower – initially squat and lowly, eventually grand and bustling – in which, believe it or not, news will be made. That means finding stories via telegraph, sending out reporters, typesetting their articles, and arranging them for production. All of this takes time – a lot of it, actually – with the Sunday print deadline always looming like a war-zeppelin on the horizon. Every story comes with content tags – crime, drama, sports, many more – and publishing multiple stories with the same tags gives big boosts to sales and subscribers.

When talking about mechanics-laden games, there’s always the risk of simply listing all the different mechanics, so to avoid that just know this is an interdisciplinary strategy experience, both macro and micro, demanding equal playerly attention to the high drama of Scoop Pursuit, as well as to the granular fiddliness of deciding where exactly on each reporter’s desk a fern plant should be placed to keep them happy. The primary sensation that News Tower evokes is of spinning about a dozen plates while standing on one foot, like some kind of big-top circus sideshow between the headliners.

These concerns converge like a swarm of militant hornets on the ol’ brainpan, and, while it is overwhelming in a way, it also creates an impressively compelling gameplay loop that slaps iron shackles on a player’s focus. Like many of the greats in the strategy space, it’s hard to find a good stopping place for a play session: there’s always something that needs attention, another goal to pursue, a new variety of potted plant to place tastefully upon a disgruntled employee’s desk.

It ain’t all sunshine and roses in the big city, though. The biggest musca domestica in the otherwise unctuous News Tower ointment is the UI and general visual clarity. Each reporter has three types of story they can cover, each with its own related icon. I’d like some additional visual cueing on the reporters, because it’s hard to remember who does what in the heat of a busy newsweek. This isn’t like X-COM, where each member of the team has a pronounced identity and specialty — even a small newsroom will have four or six reporters, all relatively anonymous in their matching fedorae and mackintosh coats.

Knowing exactly when a story will be ready to print, probably the most crucial thing to keep track of, is also harder to find than it should be. It’s easy to know when an individual step in the publishing process will be done, but the actual Ready-to-Print time is hidden away in a tooltip in a sub-menu. This means that unless a player does a lot of preparatory menu-perusing, it’s easy to queue up a story and discover it won’t be ready in time for Sunday. It’s frustrating.

There’s also just a damn lot to look after, dozens of menus and buttons and tabs – so much of it important at some point or another. The tutorial is actually a scripted campaign, and it does a good job highlighting a portion of this stuff (but not all of it) and not everybody is going to be down with a tutorial that can take longer than some whole games take to complete. After a few hours I dipped out and jumped into the deep end of the classic mode.

I want to end on a high note, though, so I’m going to return to the question of theming. A lot of management titles can have a sort of Excellian abstractness to them — a whiff of spreadsheet seeping out around their ostensible settings. Not so with News Tower. No, it evokes the golden age of paper news across its entire mechanical suite, bolstered further by an absolutely wonderful, period-appropriate live jazz soundtrack from Dutch ensemble New Cool Collective. To quote legendary schlock-peddler, Xanadu denizen, and all around freak William Randolph Hearst — it’s immersive as hell.

And from me? It’s an enthusiastic recommend.

Score: 8 out of 10

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Disclosures: This game is developed by Sparrow Night and published by Twin Sails Interactive. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not yet rated by the ESRB. Obviously, a lot of the stories that crop up (many based on real historical facts) concern tragic events, and municipal corruption plays a big part. It’s all handled with a cartoony, light touch, however — lighter than what any kid would see on any news site or social media app on any given day. Not sure if younger gamers would cotton to the theme but, if they do, there isn’t anything here to worry about.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the dialogue is text-based, but it, as well as the menu text, cannot be resized. (See in-game examples above) An important sound cue occurs whenever a story comes in on the telegraph. It’s accompanied by an icon on the menu screen, but it’s a pretty small icon. Other than that, all important events are conveyed visually.

Remappable Controls: The game supports keyboard + mouse, but not controller. The keyboard controls are fully remappable.

The post News Tower Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

There’s something genuinely appealing about a game that doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. Everdark: Undead Apocalypse is a first-person survival horror shooter that wears its B-movie inspirations proudly, and honestly, that’s exactly what makes it work. This is a lean, mean vampire-hunting experience that understands tension, resource scarcity, and the raw satisfaction of driving a stake through a bloodsucker’s heart. It’s got rough edges, but the core experience is genuinely fun.

The 80s Horror Atmosphere Actually Lands

Everdark commits fully to its retro-horror aesthetic, and you feel it immediately. The 80s vibes aren’t just window dressing—they permeate everything from the synth-inspired soundtrack to the neon-lit streets and fog-drenched environments. Built on Unreal Engine 5 and running at native 4K and 60 FPS on Xbox Series X|S, the game leverages dynamic lighting and volumetric fog to create atmosphere that actually feels threatening. Shadows stretch across alleyways, flames flicker in abandoned churches, and moonlit streets feel genuinely unsettling.

The developers, a small team of fewer than twenty people, clearly grew up loving this genre, and that passion shows. Every environment from ruined cities to desolate cathedrals has been crafted to evoke genuine dread. This isn’t a AAA production with a massive budget, but the artistic direction more than compensates for any technical limitations.

The Combat Loop Works Better Than It Has Any Right To

Here’s where Everdark surprises you: the gunplay is actually solid. You’ve got an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and melee weapons, and the action flows nicely. But the real genius is the staking mechanic. Vampires don’t die from bullets alone. You need to stagger them, close the distance, and drive a stake through their heart. It’s a risk-reward dance that makes every encounter feel like a genuine hunt rather than just another shooter.

This creates brilliant moments where you’re desperately managing limited ammo, strategically choosing which enemies to confront and which to avoid. The survival horror elements kick in here—you can’t just run in guns blazing. Sometimes you have to be smart, bait enemies away, sneak through areas. The garlic safe zones become literal sanctuaries where you catch your breath and plan your next move.

The adrenaline rush when you narrowly escape a pack of vampires and make it to safety never gets old. Neither does the satisfaction of perfectly executing a stagger-and-stake combo. It’s simple on paper, but the execution feels rewarding.

Where It Stumbles Slightly

Everdark isn’t perfect, and it’s worth being honest about its limitations. The difficulty curve is genuinely punishing, and some players will find checkpoints frustratingly short. Dying can feel abrupt, especially early on when you’re learning the systems. The health bar isn’t always crystal clear, and there’s no death animation, which means you can be retaliating one moment and back at a checkpoint the next.

The core FPS mechanics, whilst functional, aren’t strong enough to carry the game alone. Without the survival horror elements and the staking mechanic, this would feel like a fairly standard shooter. Some areas, particularly longer levels like the sewer section, can wear on you with repetitive encounter design.

There are also occasional visual glitches and some rough dialogue that, whilst charming in a B-movie way, occasionally undermines the atmosphere. But here’s the thing—these issues don’t significantly detract from what Everdark does well.

A Lean Experience That Respects Your Time

At its core, Everdark respects the player’s time. It doesn’t overstay its welcome with bloat. You get a focused campaign, a clear premise, and solid gunplay loop that doesn’t drag on forever. For a £19.99 title, that’s genuinely good value.

The game is aware of its budget limitations, and rather than pretending to be something it’s not, it doubles down on atmosphere and focused gameplay. That’s the right call.

High Stakes!

Everdark: Undead Apocalypse is a stylish, atmospheric vampire shooter that punches well above its weight. Yes, it has rough edges and occasional technical hiccups, but the core experience—managing resources, planning encounters, and executing perfectly timed stake kills—is genuinely satisfying. If you love 80s horror, survival mechanics, and don’t mind a challenging shooter that demands smart play alongside quick reflexes, this is absolutely worth your time. Small team, big vision, and a game that knows exactly what it wants to be.

The post Review: Everdark: Undead Apocalypse | Xbox appeared first on Gaming Debugged | Gaming Site Covering Xbox, Indies, News, Features and Gaming Tech.

There’s something wonderfully appealing about a game that knows it’s ridiculous. Folly of the Wizards, this colourful roguelike adventure on Xbox, absolutely embraces the idea of playing as a catastrophically unqualified wizard apprentice trying to save the world. The premise is silly, the characters are quirky, and the whole thing has this tongue-in-cheek charm that makes you want to keep plugging away at “just one more run.” But, and I say this with genuine affection for what’s here, there are some significant bumps in the road that prevent this from being the magical experience it could be.

A World Worth Exploring (Visually, At Least)

Let’s start with what Folly of the Wizards absolutely nails. The art direction is gorgeous. Each biome feels distinct and alive, from the demonic worms erupting in the desert to the noxious clouds lurking in forests. The character designs are whimsical without being cutesy to the point of annoyance, and there’s real personality in how every NPC is written. When you meet characters between runs, they feel like they belong in this weird wizarding world.

The humour is genuinely decent too. The game doesn’t take itself seriously, and it actively mocks you when you fail. There’s something oddly motivating about your wizard getting roasted after a bad run. It’s self-aware in the best way possible.

The Gameplay Loop: Familiar But Stretched Thin

The core gameplay is straightforward. You jump into procedurally generated dungeons, clear rooms, collect upgrades, and face bosses across multiple floors. You’ve got your basic spell attack, a double jump, a dash, and access to elemental spells. On paper, this is solid roguelike stuff, and to be honest, the structure works fine for the first few runs.

Having spent the last few weeks building my own platformer, I genuinely appreciate how difficult it is to nail movement mechanics and responsive controls. Folly of the Wizards gets some things right. The shooting is twin-stick style, which feels intuitive, and the platforming sections aren’t overly demanding. But here’s where things get messy.

The controls on console are genuinely bizarre. Jump is bound to LB/L1. LB! In a game where jumping and dashing are absolutely vital to survival. I understand why this bothers people so much because, frankly, it’s weird. The game doesn’t feel natural to play on controller, and what makes this even more frustrating is that X/A is just sitting there, unused. At minimum, letting players remap controls would have solved this entirely.

The System Confusion Problem

Beyond the controls, Folly of the Wizards suffers from what I’d call “system inflation without explanation.” You can grab from a pool of 130 relics, tomes, and scrolls during a run. That’s a lot of variety, and theoretically, that’s brilliant. In practice? You’ll often pick something up and have absolutely no idea what it does.

The in-game catalogue offers visual descriptions but almost nothing about actual functionality. You might grab something that accidentally replaces your favourite weapon, and there’s no way to get it back. It’s frustrating not because the systems don’t exist, but because they’re never explained. A simple tooltip system would have changed everything.

The affinity system with NPCs has similar problems. Depending on your conversations, you’ll build relationships that apparently determine what items become available. But here’s the thing: it’s never explained how this actually works. You’re largely guessing, and whilst the writing is charming, the systems behind it remain opaque.

The Grind Against Repetition

Here’s my honest assessment after several runs: Folly of the Wizards is engaging in shorter bursts, but it doesn’t quite have that addictive “one more run” feeling that roguelikes need to survive. The visuals carry the experience initially, but after a couple of longer sessions, the repetition starts to wear on you. The bosses help break things up, but the room-to-room combat loop doesn’t vary enough to keep pulling you back.

The game is perfectly playable in 30-minute chunks, but it doesn’t inspire marathon sessions. And when the roguelike genre is absolutely packed with options, that’s a significant problem. You need something special to keep players invested, and Folly of the Wizards relies too heavily on its charm rather than its mechanics.

What Actually Works

Don’t get me wrong: there’s real fun to be had here. The moment-to-moment gameplay feels good when things click. Learning which enemies are vulnerable to specific elements creates actual strategy. The boss fights are creative and memorable. And honestly, the writing throughout is consistently entertaining.

For players who genuinely love roguelikes and don’t mind the steep difficulty curve, there’s absolutely something worth exploring. The 22 unique bosses, 9 biomes, and multiple endings give you reason to keep going. It’s just that these good elements sit alongside genuine frustrations.

Folly of the Wizards is a charming roguelike let down by unintuitive controls, poor system explanation, and repetitive gameplay loops that wear thin after a few hours. There’s real magic buried here, but it’s weighed down by mechanical clunk. Worth trying if you’re a roguelike enthusiast, but casual players will likely bounce off quickly.

The post Review: Folly of the Wizards | Xbox appeared first on Gaming Debugged | Gaming Site Covering Xbox, Indies, News, Features and Gaming Tech.

Help Bob the Brick Breaker (as opposed to Bob the Builder), break bricks by bouncing a wrecking ball with a girder.  Yup, it’s a BreakOut or Arkanoid clone.  But is it as good as those classics?  You’ll just have to read on to find out!  The game is available on Switch and PlayStation consoles, but […]

My two favorite video game consoles are the Super Nintendo and PlayStation.  I played so many great games on those systems, and there were so many more that never came out overseas!  That’s why I like when a company snags a Japan only classic and brings it over here.  Such is the case with Milano’s […]

Seeing as though I’m old enough to have experienced Pac-Man when it first came out, I’m pretty familiar with most retro games.  However, sometimes one comes along that just flew under the radar for me.  Montezuma’s Revenge was one such game.  I remember seeing it back then, but never playing it.  Many years later, at […]

Paws of Fury was a movie released in theaters a couple of years ago.  I never bothered with it then, as it looked like a Kung-Fu Panda rip-off.  But before writing this review, I did manage to watch the movie on Netflix.  I found it interesting that Mel Brooks did one of the voices and […]

When I was a kid, I loved reading newspaper comic strips.  And I still have a strong interest in them today!  Some of my favorites include Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, and of course, Peanuts.  When I was little and a Peanuts TV special was on, you can bet I was planted in front of […]

When I was young, I loved watching stuff on the kids’ cable channel Nickelodeon like Danger Mouse, Double Dare, and You Can’t Do That on Television (yeah I’m THAT old school).  But even years later as a teen and young adult I liked watching Nicktoons like Rocko’s Modern Life and Invader ZIM.  And once my […]

The Zircon 660 Pro Wireless from Genesis aims to give you the best of all worlds: lightweight, modern sensor performance, and flexible connectivity — wired, 2.4 GHz low‑latency wireless, or Bluetooth. For under or around mid-budget range, it manages to deliver a compelling all‑rounder for casual and competitive players alike. If you want a mouse that works…

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Genesis‘s Krypton 660 arrives as a tidy answer to a very simple question: Can you get modern ultralight mouse features without breaking the bank? The short answer is yes — the Genesis Krypton 660 nails the basic ultralight formula (very low mass, flexible cable, solid sensor) and pairs it with approachable software and RGB flair.…

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Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: From the Ashes by Ubisoft was released on December 19, 2025, just before Christmas. A game that quickly reminded me why I first fell in love with Pandora’s vivid world in 2023. While the original game had its highs and lows, this expansion offers a new story that feels personal, meaningful,…

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I’ll be straight up: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is one of the craziest game experiences I’ve had in a long time. You stroll into it knowing it’s been hyped forever, thanks to the original game being so good, a sequel to a beloved cult classic, finally arriving after years of delays, cancellations, and an…

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Sektori from developer Kimmo Lahtinen is what I’d like to call a work of art. And before I get questioned heavily here for stating such, there’s a lot to unpack here as to why. Honestly, this is one of the best twin-stick shooter games I’ve played in ages! So what exactly is Sektori, and why…

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Hitman Absolution on Switch stealth-dropped unexpectedly, letting players dive back into Agent 47’s thrilling world of assassinations and strategy. Stealth drops can be wonderful things. There’s nothing quite as exciting as seeing a game you didn’t expect to come out anytime soon, if at all, popping up out of nowhere. Especially if it’s a game…

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Neon Inferno drops you into New York thirty years from now, a neon-soaked lawless utopia where corrupt cops and crime syndicates fight for control. Angelo and Mariana are assassins for a rival Family, tasked with taking out the competition. In this dystopian cyberpunk future, they’re the killers you want on your side—one bullet at a…

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We are back with the latest title from Frontier Developments, Jurassic World Evolution 3, and this time, the franchise feels more alive than ever. With the park opening to the world on October 21, 2025, the game builds upon the solid foundations of its predecessors with smarter dinosaurs, a selection of deeper management tools, and…

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Sword of the Sea, from Developer and Publisher Giant Squid, is an atmospheric game similar to the likes of Journey and Flower. It’s also directly comparable to Giant Squid’s previous titles, such as Abzu and The Pathless, and as such, it has a lot of expectations to fulfil in terms of quality. So does Sword…

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Tormented Souls 2 takes place two years after developer Dual Effect first put Caroline Walker through the ringer in an abandoned hospital, where she lost her eye, travelled through time, and descended into a dark, other-side world to save herself and her sister from her grandfather’s twisted plans and a god-like entity. But it’s not…

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